Many politicians and educators want to steal our children. According to these activists, parents can feed and house children, but can’t guide their education or tell them how to choose right from wrong. Parents merely act as custodians of the State’s property. Here are recent samples of this line of thinking.

Media says that parents have no right to interfere with a public school education. The Washington Post printed a guest editorial that claims:

[E]ducation should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents.

…

When do the interests of parents and children diverge? Generally, it occurs when a parent’s desire to inculcate a particular worldview denies the child exposure to other ideas and values that an independent young person might wish to embrace or at least entertain.[1]

That is, parents have no right to shield their children from any sort of predator or groomer having evil intent. As we’ll see later, this “no rights” idea comes from the claim that the interests of the child are automatically at odds with those of the parents.

Politicians also say parents have no such rights. In his campaign for reelection, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe promoted this statist argument against parents’ rights in education. He said it this way:

“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions … I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”[2]

This statement was a key reason for his electoral defeat. But he didn’t get this opinion out of the blue. His friends and donors, teacher unions and school administrators, encouraged this thought.[3] They even call these nurturing parents “terrorists.”[4]

Parents are tyrants. Noah Berlatsky, a prominent liberal author, claims:

parents are tyrants. “parent” is an oppressive class, like rich people or white people.

…

socialists should be wary of the nuclear family; Marx is pretty definitive about that.[5]

Berlatsky has the traditional Marxist fear about the family, that its primary loyalty is to itself and not the (socialist) community.

We must abolish parenthood itself. According to columnist Joe Mathews[6] we must forbid parents from raising their own children. This amounts to abolishing parenting altogether. His article says:

Fathers and mothers with greater wealth and education are more likely to transfer these advantages to their children, compounding privilege over generations. As a result, children of less advantaged parents face an uphill struggle, social mobility has stalled, and democracy has been corrupted.

…

My solution — making raising your own children illegal — is simple, and while we wait for the legislation to pass, we can act now: the rich and poor should trade kids, and homeowners might swap children with their homeless neighbors.

…

In his “Republic,” Plato adopted Socrates’ sage advice — that children “be possessed in common, so that no parent will know his own offspring or any child his parents” — in order to defeat nepotism, and create citizens loyal not to their sons but to society.

…

But don’t pay those critics any mind. Because they just can’t see how our relentless pursuit of equity might birth a brave new world.[7]

(Note: Mathews’ is apparently embarrassed by what he said. Other web sites have a version of this column that reads “My solution is simple”, along with other minor changes. Just what is Mathews’ afraid of you reading?)

If a mother is banned from raising her own newborn – how can one even contemplate this confiscation? (Jeremiah 31:15) – then it’s likely that women won’t bother to have children at all. Whether Mathews offered satire or no, his “universal orphanhood” proposal aligns with socialist thought.

Why should we care what they say? These screeds against parents’ rights give us glimpses of why these activists, including teachers and school administrators, have become our opponents. Their words disclose their desires and plans. Believe them when they say they want to make changes. And if unopposed, they’ll create a cultural revolution by government fiat. Read on to understand what drives their animosity. You’ll also find some thoughts on how to confront this war on parenting.

The war against families and parental authority

Whose child is this? Does the child “belong” to his or her parents, or to the State? The answer to this question shapes our society. For example, without families raising children you wouldn’t have multi-bedroom homes, minivans, or even suburbs. We’d merely have loose communities of selfish, self-centered people, for the responsibility of nurturing children teaches commitment, devotion, and compassion.

By tradition and law, the parents have the primary responsibility for a child’s custody, care, and nurture. This responsibility also covers teaching morals and values, and deciding the content of education. That these decisions are for the parents to make, and not the State, has been repeatedly confirmed by the courts. One such Supreme Court case is Wisconsin v Yoder:

The history and culture of Western civilization reflect a strong tradition of parental concern for the nurture and upbringing of their children. This primary role of the parents in the upbringing of their children is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition. – Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972) [8]

But recent academic agitators have decided to debate the issue anyway. They say that parents are unfit to teach because they’re tyrants.[9] One of these agitators is Elizabeth Bartholet,[10] who wrote this about parents directing their children’s education:

The legal claim made in defense of the current homeschooling regime is based on a dangerous idea about parent rights—that those with enormous physical and other power over infants and children should be subject to virtually no check on that power. That parents should have monopoly control over children’s lives, development, and experience. That parents who are committed to beliefs and values counter to those of the larger society are entitled to bring their children up in isolation, so as to help ensure that they will replicate the parents’ views and lifestyle choices.

This legal claim is inconsistent with the child’s right to what has been called an “open future”—the right to exposure to alternative views and experiences essential for children to grow up to exercise meaningful choices about their own future views, religion, lifestyles, and work.

It is inconsistent with state laws and constitutional provisions guaranteeing child rights to education. It is inconsistent with state and federal laws guaranteeing children protection against abuse and neglect.[11]

By “open future,” she means State-approved morals and perspectives. Her view, and distortion of family law, is meant to break our society. She claims that children must be presumptively protected from their very own parents! James Dwyer,[12] a close associate of Bartholet, claims that “parental rights” amounts to kidnapping. He wrote:

But it is only because state statutes make biological parents the legal parents of a newborn child and give legal parents presumptive custody rights that birth parents have legal permission to do what would otherwise be kidnapping—that is, to take a person to their home and confine the person there without that person’s consent.[13]

And elsewhere Dwyer wrote:

The reason that parent-child relationship exists is because the state confers legal parenthood on people through its paternity and maternity laws.[14]

According to Dwyer, the concepts of “parenting” and “family” are mere legal constructs, that they didn’t exist until some government made them happen. Instead of government existing to serve the community, he thinks that people exist solely to serve the government. In the end, these activists want to make all children wards of the state.

Through this analysis, it becomes apparent that the claim that parents should have child-rearing rights – rather than simply being permitted to perform parental duties and to make certain decisions on a child’s behalf in accordance with the child’s rights – is inconsistent with principles deeply embedded in our law and morality.[15]

In Dwyer’s world, once you bring your children home you may only do for them what the government permits.

I propose further that the law confer on parents simply a child-rearing privilege, limited in its scope to actions and decisions not inconsistent with the child’s temporal interests. Such a privilege, coupled with a broader set of children’s rights, is sufficient to satisfy parents’ legitimate interests in child-rearing.[16]

In short, the mother and father may only play at being parents, being sure to not to instill virtues not preordained by the statist bureaucrats. This mirrors what the Soviets tried, and failed at, in Russia:

What responsibilities are left to the parents, when they no longer have to take charge of upbringing and education?… The state does not need the family, because the domestic economy is no longer profitable: the family distracts the worker from more useful and productive labour.[17]

Even today, Communists want to abolish the family:

Today, the main backwards role the family plays is the oppression of children, who are subjected to a tyranny of the parents and denied the basic rights which should belong to every human, most importantly the right of free development of the personality.[18]

To summarize, we don’t find American parents begging the government to take away their rights. Rather, academics have invented a rift between parent and child. They want the government to institutionalize their divisive, never-tried, and ungodly ways of dealing with children.

Defend all of our rights of parenting

Elected officials promise to represent all of us. However, they keep aligning themselves with tiny activist groups. Maybe it’s for the campaign money, or maybe the officials feel threatened by the activists’ political threats. Senator Everett Dirksen said about politicians, “when they feel the heat, they see the light.”[19]

To preserve our religious and parental rights, Christians need to do more than just vote. We must bring our own “heat.” Here are my suggestions for bringing political heat, some of which may surprise you.

Be persistent in pleading your cause. Politicians expect any that outrage against them will fade over time. Usually, political persistence is found only in those people wanting favors, and who have the money with which to buy them. If politicians don’t hear opposing voices, then they’ll forget their true constituencies.

Christians must frequently remind their officials just whom they represent, and that they’re supposed to be both just and impartial (Exodus 23:1-3; Leviticus 19:15). For example, isn’t trading donations for favors showing partiality? We must be like the widow who petitioned her unrighteous judge both day and night (Luke 18:1-5).

Be persistent in prayer. After telling us of the widow and the wicked judge, Jesus told us to be persistent before God. He will surely bring forth justice (Luke 18:6-8).

Be loud and be heard. Don’t be crude, but also don’t be timid. After all, the prophets weren’t gentle with the people concerning with God’s word (Jeremiah 36). And even Jesus riled up people when he scourged the Temple (John 2:13-16). Make sure that your officials have heard you, even if it means following them around. Make them uncomfortable, and even give them midnight serenades. After all, it’s protected political speech.[20] 

Be the all-important precinct captain. The best way to get politicians you like is to help weed out the bad ones before they even get to the ballot. That means becoming your own precinct’s captain, the most important political role in the country. Both the Democrats[21] and Republicans[22] recognize that political power starts with the precinct. The precinct captain walks through the precinct, at each home promoting the candidates he or she approves of. This means the captain has great power to influence elections.

Becoming a captain is easier than you think. See the site precinctstrategy.com to find out how.[23]

Be bold in the courts. The right to worship (First Amendment) doesn’t mean only the ability to think religious thoughts. It means being able to physically practice your religion in your private and public life. This also includes how your religion affects your parenting, such as in the Wisconsin v Yoder case (see above).[24] And ever since the Fourteenth Amendment, state law can’t be used to limit religious rights or activity.[25] But government officials, or the courts, won’t proactively fight for your rights. You yourself must act, challenging bad actions, laws, and decrees (“executive orders”) in court.

Be obedient to God, not to evil commands. In Romans 13, the apostle Paul speaks of obedience to authorities. The ruler is a “minister of God to you for good” (Romans 13:4). That is, a ruler is God’s delegated authority to encourage and enforce godly behavior. But if a ruler issues evil commands, he or she does so outside of that delegated authority to be a “minister for good.” You have no obligation before God to obey any evil commands.[26]

This principle was understood, and used, many times. Here’s a few cases:[27]

• In the 16^th century, Lutherans resisted the Emperor. He told them to abandon “salvation by grace” or be killed.

• In the 17^th century, Scots resisted King Charles. He gave them a new, “official” way to worship which denied their Presbyterian beliefs.

• In the 1770s, the American Colonists resisted King George. He tried numerous means to deny their God-given rights and freedoms.

All three of these cases have the same idea: while a ruler may have physical power, he or she has no moral or legal authority when acting beyond the ruler’s scope of office. In all three cases the communities resorted to military force to resist the unrighteous commands.

This “minister for good” concept is worth understanding well. It’s guidance for when you must decide to either obey God or obey an ungodly command. I recommend you read the referenced article, to be sure of yourself.

Be a shield against cultural insurrection. As we see, teachers, advocates, and politicians are seeking control of children that aren’t theirs. This is a power grab, a literal insurrection by elites. If Christians, and if parents, don’t block this then we might lose both our children and our American society.

Protect our children from subversive public schools

We’ve been blind and lazy about our public schools. We trusted our teachers and school officials, but they betrayed this trust by actively, and unapologetically, working against community values. They deny parental input, and also refuse oversight of their dealings.[28] We can’t even believe them when they do tell us things.[29] Perhaps as a joke, President Ronald Reagan said about the Russians “Trust, but verify.”[30] We could been verifying public schooling a long time ago, saving ourselves much grief.

If the public school people won’t teach community values, and reject community oversight, then why pay them with community property taxes? They promote society-altering socialism: Critical Race Theory,[31] the anti-American 1619 Project,[32] and liberating children from their parents (see above). These aren’t American community values!

Therefore, protecting our children revolves around getting them into schooling that their parents can trust. This generally means private schools or homeschooling. But what about families for this is a pipe dream? For them, leaving the public schools is hard for reasons like these:

• Private schools aren’t cheap. One survey has the tuition of Illinois private high schools at about $12,000 per year.[33] You might find a lower-priced school hosted in a subsidized building, or supported by charitable donations. You also might find a school with a fancy campus, because it’s intended to attract wealthy parents. But on the average, attending a private school is a substantial burden on the family budget.

But even at those rates, a family still might be able to swing a private school education. That is, if that family wasn’t forced to also pay for the expensive public schools. For example, in 2020 Chicago public schools spent about $30,000 per student![34] Even Paul Vallas, who used to run the Chicago public schools, now wants a practical school voucher program.[35]

• Parents are at work, and not available for homeschooling. Many families are single-parent households, or have both parents working outside of the home. They can’t take advantage of homeschooling because no adult would be at home to supervise their children.

• Educating special needs children is costly. When schooling children with severe mental or physical handicaps, extra aides, specialists, and facilities are needed. Parents of these children can currently turn only to the public school systems.

I don’t have big, comprehensive, plans that fix community schools to everyone’s satisfaction. And I don’t want such plans, for they lead to big, comprehensive bureaucracies. Rather, when people act in their own self interest they uncover small solutions to limited problems. Those that work get adopted by others. Here are my ideas for small solutions to education problems.

Take over your local school board. If you don’t trust the public schools, then why not clean house? Once you, and your friends, have control you can get rid of the bad people, fix the curricula, create transparency, etc. Sure, the teacher unions would be determined and formidable opponents. After all, you’re cutting in on their game. But a community coalition can win.

I’m serious about this. Here is a campaign cookbook that teaches how to network, and how to campaign to win.[36] Yes, it’s hard work, but it pays off. At the very least, you’ll have created the sort of “heat” your local politicians pay attention to.

Invent, and promote, easy-to-use homeschool systems. Homeschooling has a reputation for being hard to do. Yet:

• There are already homeschooling systems that claim to be easy to use. The parents get guidance on setting up their school. The student lessons might even be supplied as computer lectures. And the vendors do the hard work of getting the students’ efforts academically recognized.

• There might already be an online catalog or directory of easy homeschooling systems.

But if these easy systems are out there, then why are they so hard to find? And if there is a catalog of them, then where is it? My point is that self-promotion goes a long way to multiplying the number of families willing to try homeschooling.

I’m willing to use my blog to promote easy-to-use curricula providers, and catalogs of curricula. I also think that other blogs would do likewise. And if these online catalogs don’t yet exist, then who can start the first one?

Create models for bare-bones, but affordable, private schools. Modeling a private school on the public school model results in a pricey education. After all, public schools aren’t designed to be economical.

But what if a school pattern was created that has no frills: no sports teams, no fancy campus, no snob appeal for parents. Its attraction would be providing a competent, but inexpensive, education. The parents could shop among such schools, choosing which one best suited their desires. Such schools could be held wherever empty office space, or empty meeting halls, could be found. And they’d be priced so low that parents could use them even while paying for the public schools they aren’t using.

How inexpensive can we get? A school is just curricula, a teacher, some students, and a place for holding classes. Suppose that:

• Online curricula were used to do the actual teaching. The students would be largely interacting with the computer lessons. Such online teaching is already available from various private schools, and from some homeschool curricula publishers. It ought to be inexpensive to license these for a private school.

• Teachers and assistants monitor the students in their online learning. Their main teaching role would be to help the students over particular lesson difficulties, so you wouldn’t need many people. Perhaps you could get by with three or four adults per hundred children. That, and reminders from the parents that their children behave “or else.”

• The school could be held in a church basement, a rented hall, or some underused business property. There are enough of these places that a school could be placed most anywhere in a community. A quick online search of school codes reveals few conditions on building suitability, the biggest concerns being those of the fire departments.

A school of a hundred students, with full-time staff, held in a business property (that is, paying rent), might get by with an annual tuition of less than $6000. The actual numbers depend on the details.[37]

For me, an added benefit of inexpensive private schools is that it forces the public schools to scale back, for their funding is partially based on actual student attendance. A shrinking student base means they must sell underused properties, and perhaps become more responsive to their communities.

Promote a “community chest” to help special needs children get their education. Public schools are primarily funded by community property taxes. This means that parents of public school students don’t pay the entire costs of that year’s education. They’re subsidized by other homeowners.

This subsidy is even greater for special needs children. For example, a student with severe disabilities might need a one-on-one aide. The community, through the school, subsidizes this student more than it does other students.

If the switch to private schools works out, and the public school system shrinks, then we must remember these special needs students, along with their families. But we should help them through private donations, and not through taxes. A community, and not its government, should take care of its own. For example, look at what President Grover Cleveland said.

In February 1887, President Grover Cleveland, upon vetoing a bill appropriating money to aid drought-stricken farmers in Texas, said,

“I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and the duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.”

President Cleveland added,

“The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.”[38]

You already see Facebook and Go Fund Me appeals for certain individuals and causes. That is the same sort of giving spirit that these parents will need for their disabled children’s education. What did you think those Monopoly “Community Chest” cards meant? Give, to help those in your community.

May I help?

I’d like parents to regain control of their children’s education. I currently know precious little of the details concerning private schools, but I think I can help anyway. For example, I could help catalog and promote useful homeschooling systems. And I could help work out details of “model inexpensive schools.” I also know a thing or two about computers.

If you’d like to write and see if I really can help, leave an email at this (slightly-obfuscated) address:  trusted.schools –at- fixthisculture.com

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Footnotes 

[1]      Schneider, Jack and Berkshire, Jennifer, Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t., Washington Post, October 21, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/parents-rights-protests-kids/2021/10/21/5cf4920a-31d4-11ec-9241-aad8e48f01ff_story.html

[2]      Terry McAuliffe’s War on Parents, National Review, October 1, 2021, https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/terry-mcauliffes-war-on-parents/

[3]      Duggan, Laurel, Teachers Union President Backing McAuliffe Promotes Article Claiming Parents Don’t Have A ‘Right’ In What Kids Are Taught, Daily Caller News Foundation, October 26, 2021, https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2021/10/26/randi-weingartin-terry-mcauliffe-teachers-union-curriculum/

[4]      Sims, Gwendolyn, Concerned Parents Are ‘Immediate Threat’ Says National School Boards Association President—Some Are Even Domestic Terrorists!, PJ Media, October 1, 2021, https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/gwendolynsims/2021/10/01/concerned-parents-are-immediate-threat-says-national-school-boards-association-president-some-are-even-domestic-terrorists-n1521073

[5]      Berlatsky, Noah, Parents are tyrants, Twitter, December 14, 2020, https://twitter.com/nberlat/status/1338586940157927427

[6]      Joe Mathews, LA Progressive, https://www.laprogressive.com/author/joe-mathews/

[7]      Mathews, Joe, Column: California should abolish parenthood, in the name of equity, Yahoo News, January 13, 2022, https://www.yahoo.com/news/column-california-abolish-parenthood-name-181725030.html

[8]      The Supreme Court’s Parental Rights Doctrine, Parental Rights, https://parentalrights.org/understand_the_issue/supreme-court/
The left column has several legal quotes, accessed by clicking on the line of “dot” links. The Yoder quote is merely one of these quotes.

[9]      Poole, Christian, The Case for Homeschooling (Part 1): The Strangeness of the Anti-Homeschool Movement, ThinkingWest, May 19, 2020, https://thinkingwest.com/2020/05/19/part-1-the-anti-homeschool-movement/

[10]    Elizabeth Bartholet, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bartholet

[11]    Bartholet, Elizabeth, Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection, Arizona Law Review, Volume 62, Issue 1 [2020], https://arizonalawreview.org/pdf/62-1/62arizlrev1.pdf

[12]    James Dwyer, William & Mary Law School, https://law2.wm.edu/faculty/bios/fulltime/jgdwye.php

[13]    Dwyer, James, A Constitutional Birthright: The State, Parentage, and the Rights of Newborn Persons, UCLA Law Review, page 762, 56 UCLA LAW REVIEW 755 (2009), http://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/56-4-1.pdf

[14]    Prominent Law Prof: ‘State Should Take Over the Legal Parental Role of Children’, Truth and Action, http://www.truthandaction.org/prominent-law-prof-state-should-take-over-the-legal-parental-role-of-children/2/
Alas! The original quote was in an interview on the CRTV network, but any transcription isn’t found on the internet. In some cases, the internet is NOT forever.

[15]    Dwyer, James, Parents’ Religion and Children’s Welfare: Debunking the Doctrine of Parents’ Rights, page 1373, William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository, Faculty Publications, January 1994, https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1167&context=facpubs

[16]    Dwyer, James, Parents’ Religion, page 1374.

[17]    Kollontai, Alexandra, Communism and the Family, published in The Worker, 1920, collected in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, Allison & Busby, 1977, found at https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm

[18]    Meghany, The communist abolition of the family, Destroy Capitalism Now!, March 26, 2017, https://destroycapitalismnow.wordpress.com/2017/03/26/abolish-the-family/

[19]    “Politicians see the light when they feel the heat”, The Big Apple blog, December 2, 2010, https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/politicians_see_the_light_when_they_feel_the_heat

[20]    Schow, Ashe, Washington Post Defends Protesters At Senator Josh Hawley’s Home: ‘Peaceful Vigil’, The Daily Wire, January 5, 2021, https://www.dailywire.com/news/washington-post-defends-protesters-at-senator-josh-hawleys-home-peaceful-vigil

[21]    Rural Organizing & Engagement Toolkit for Precinct Captains, Democratic Party Official Website, https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Rural-Precinct-Chair-Toolkit.pdf

[22]    5 Duties of the Precinct Chair, Collin County Republican Party, September 3, 2015, https://www.collincountygop.org/news/5-duties-of-the-precinct-chair/

[23]    Shultz, Dan, Precinct Strategy, https://precinctstrategy.com/

[24]    The Supreme Court’s Parental Rights Doctrine, Parental Rights

[25]    McCarthy, Mary, Application of the First Amendment to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, Notre Dame Law Review, Volume 22, Issue 4, Article 2, May 1, 1947, https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3880&context=ndlr

[26]    Perry, Oliver, American Christians, Tyranny, and Resistance, Illinois Family Institute, May 20, 2021, https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/faith/american-christians-tyranny-and-resistance/

[27]    Ibid.

[28]    Kingkade, Tyler, They fought critical race theory. Now they’re focusing on ‘curriculum transparency.’, NBC News, January 20, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/critical-race-theory-curriculum-transparency-rcna12809?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma

[29]    LaChance, Mike, Report: California Public School Teachers Being Told to Hide Critical Race Materials From Parents, Legal Insurrection, April 14, 2021, https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/04/report-california-public-school-teachers-being-told-to-hide-critical-race-materials-from-parents/

[30]    Watson, William, Trust, but Verify: Reagan, Gorbachev, and the INF Treaty, The Hilltop Review, Volume 5, Issue 1 (Fall), Article 5, Western Michigan University, December 2011, https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=hilltopreview

[31]    Perry, Oliver, Critical Race Theory is anti-Christian, Illinois Family Institute, October 8, 2021, https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/marriage/crt-racismblm/critical-race-theory-is-anti-christian/

[32]    The 1619 Project, Critical Race Training in Education, https://criticalrace.org/the-1619-project/

[33]    Illinois Private High Schools By Tuition Cost, Private School Review, https://www.privateschoolreview.com/tuition-stats/illinois/high

[34]    Conklin, Audrey, Chicago Teachers Union demands to know how Lightfoot is spending $2B in federal COVID relief for schools, Fox Business, January 5, 2021, https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/chicago-2-billion-covid-relief-schools
The article has an embedded link (see below) that effectively hides per-pupil spending by dividing it between fixed costs (the buildings, etc.) and instructional costs (the teaching). See http://www.illinoisreportcard.com/District.aspx?source=environment&source2=perstudentspending&Districtid=15016299025

[35]    Vallas, Paul, Guest Column–Paul Vallas: There is No Choice But School Choice, John Kass News, https://johnkassnews.com/there-is-no-choice-but-school-choice/

[36]    Toolkit: Combatting Critical Race Theory in your Community, Citizens for Renewing America, June 8, 2021, https://citizensrenewingamerica.com/issues/combatting-critical-race-theory-in-your-community/

[37]    Let’s try to estimate annual tuition for a school of 100 students.

1. A private school needs adult staff, which are full-time jobs for them. Factoring in benefits, let’s estimate one school master at $100,000, plus two assistants at $50,000, plus one administrator at $70,000. This gives annual labor costs of $270,000. We can use so few people because the teaching is done largely through computers, and we’ll have substantial moral support from the parents, pressuring their children to cooperate.
2. There are various homeschooling curricula that can be used. We could also turn to existing online schools whose online lessons we can lease. These sources will provide lessons, as well as proof (like “accreditation”). I see advertised costs of somewhere near $1,000 per pupil. I’d think that for a hundred students at once you could get a substantial discount on leases, so estimate licensing at $500 per pupil, or $50,000 per hundred students.
3. The school needs a suitable site. It might be the “between friends” use of a church hall, or currently vacant business space. Lacking specificity, I pick a number out of the air and say that facilities and utilities cost $300,000 for a year.
4. The annual costs for teachers, curriculum, and facilities comes to about (270,000 + 50,000 + 300,000 =) $620,000, or $6,200 per student.
5. A particular school could end up with much lower operating costs, but because of donated labor or facilities. Additionally, does the school intend to make even a small amount of money, or is it offered as a community service?

[38]    Williams, Walter, Charity Not a Proper Function of the American Government, The Liberal Institute, http://www.liberalinstitute.com/CharityNotProperGovernmentFunction.html

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When humanist John Dewey and his disciples took over the emerging government-education system created decades earlier to advance collectivism, the fledgling system was still in its infancy.

By the time he died in 1952, though, it was a well-oiled collectivist machine that would obliterate America’s religious, intellectual, and political heritage more effectively than any force previously imaginable.

Dewey is often lauded as the founding father of the “progressive” education that now has more than 85 percent of American children in its grip. Although he wasn’t alone—he stood on the shoulders of fellow collectivists Robert Owen and Horace Mann—Dewey certainly deserves much of the credit, or blame, for unleashing it on the United States and humanity.

Like Mann and Owen before him, Dewey had ulterior motives when he dedicated himself with missionary zeal to the cause of “education reform.” Fortunately for future generations and historians, he was a prolific writer who cranked out a seemingly never-ending stream of essays, papers, manifestos, and articles. His views and objectives, then, are hardly a mystery.

Dewey wanted to fundamentally transform the United States. He wanted it to look more like the Soviet Union, in fact. To do that, he believed a total transformation of education and society was required—literally “changing the conception of what constitutes education,” as he wrote in “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education” in 1904.

Education must bring about a “new social order,” he argued.

As was the case with virtually all of the key figures involved in the government takeover of education, Dewey rejected Christianity and even the very existence of God. More on his religion later. He also rejected the individualism and liberty that defined America up to that point, with its strong protections for God-given rights, private property, and free markets.

Instead, Dewey worked fiendishly to continue the severing of American and Western education’s Christian roots. The process was launched by Owen, the Welsh communist whose commune in Indiana failed. It formally took root under Mann in Massachusetts, when he imported the Owen-inspired Prussian model of education. But that was all to be just the beginning.

By the time Dewey and his disciples worked their magic, the scheme would culminate in a nation in which the overwhelming majority of high-school seniors violently reject the biblical worldview, and in which most young people describe themselves as socialist.

On top of that, the system would produce a nation in which less than a third of those same seniors would even be considered “proficient” in reading and math, according to federal data gathered from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Replacing Freedom With Collectivism via Education

Interestingly, Dewey was from Burlington, Vermont—socialist Bernie Sanders’s stomping grounds. And like Sanders, Dewey styled himself a “democratic” socialist. But many decades before Sanders visited the Soviet Union on his honeymoon while it was slaughtering and torturing dissidents, Dewey made a pilgrimage to Moscow under Bolshevik rule.

Of course, Karl Marx called for government control of education in “The Communist Manifesto,” and so the Soviets complied. Decades earlier, Owen, another communist, did the same. Dewey picked up where they left off, fervently advocating total control of all education by the state with even more passion than Sanders does today.

Writing in the far-left magazine New Republic, Dewey provided glowing reports about the communist system being imposed upon the people of the Soviet Union. He was especially pleased with its so-called education system, celebrating the way it was instilling a “collectivistic mentality” in Soviet children in his “Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World” published in 1929.

Despite his fondness for Soviet totalitarianism and the communist “ideology” behind it, Dewey would publicly criticize Stalin and Stalinism later in life. His model for a communist United States, by contrast, was outlined in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 book “Looking Backward,” a fantasy about a wonderful collectivist America in the year 2000 where all private property would be nationalized by government.

Dewey’s socialist views were hardly a secret. In “Liberalism and Social Action,” he wrote that the “only form of enduring social organization that is now possible is one in which the new forces of productivity are cooperatively controlled.” “Organized social planning,” he continued in his well-known 1935 work, “is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims.”

In common with virtually all the totalitarians of the 20th century, Dewey understood that the education of children would be fundamental to achieving his Utopian vision of collectivism. “Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness,” he claimed. “The adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.”

Out With 3 Rs, in With Collectivism

In his important 1898 essay “The Primary Education Fetich [sic],” Dewey argued strongly against the then-heavy emphasis on reading, writing, and arithmetic in the younger years. It produced highly literate, independent-minded individualists with faith in God and freedom. That was not conducive to a collectivist Utopia, obviously.

Instead, Dewey thought the main focus of education during those precious early years should be socialization and emphasizing collectivism. In particular, the reformer wanted to ditch reading and writing in the primary grades to concentrate on giving children “the habits of thought and action” that he believed were “required for effective participation in community life.”

An astute operator, Dewey recognized that the liberty-minded and overwhelmingly Christian teachers, taxpayers, and parents of America of that era would never knowingly support his radical educational and political ambitions if they understood them. “Change must come gradually,” he explained in that same essay. “To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.”

So instead of going to the American people, Dewey went to the Rockefeller oil dynasty, which was giving away unfathomable amounts of money for “educational reform” through the “General Education Board.” The “philanthropic” outfit gave Dewey millions of dollars to create an experimental school to try out his ideas—a school that successfully cranked out reading-disabled collectivists.

In his crucial 1916 work “Democracy and Education,” Dewey argued that the education regime he envisioned would be “the process through which the needed transformation may be accomplished.” And so, he set about taking control of the education system.

Having failed as a primary- and secondary-school educator, Dewey’s effort to seize control of the school system began with a leadership position in education at the Rockefeller-funded University of Chicago. Later, he went to Columbia University’s Teachers College.

From his ivory-tower perch, Dewey would train up legions of teachers and disciples to unleash on an unsuspecting United States and carry forward his vision. It worked. Dewey became the founding father of America’s “progressive” public education system, and his ideology went mainstream.

Another Dewey “achievement” while in academia was resurrecting quack methods for teaching reading that had been discredited in the 1840s under Mann in Boston. That incredible saga—the root cause of America’s current illiteracy crisis—will be the subject of a future piece in this series.

Perhaps even more important and far-reaching than being able to advance his views on education and politics was Dewey’s influence on the religious views of Americans. Dewey was a self-proclaimed humanist, with his public declarations on religion fusing atheism with socialism and communism. His success on this front is unquestionable and will be the subject of an upcoming piece in this series as well.

In fairness to Dewey, Owen, Mann, and the lesser-known characters behind the government takeover of education, they didn’t have the 20th century in the rearview mirror. It might be said, in their defense, that they did not know the ideology of collectivism, when implemented, would lead to the untimely deaths and mass slaughter of hundreds of millions of people. Now, we should know better.

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This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

Standardized tests show Americans are getting dumber and dumber with each passing year. And polls now consistently show that more than half of young Americans today prefer socialism over freedom. This is obviously not sustainable—at least if the United States is going to survive as a free society.

It’s also not an accident.

To solve this crisis, it’s essential to have an understanding of where public schools came from and what existed prior to their establishment. After all, before the proliferation of government schools, Americans were the best-educated people on the planet—just consider the Founding Fathers, and the “Federalist Papers,” to get a sense of the level of education that once prevailed in America.

The history of how the government was able to take over—and the characters behind that effort—is almost incredible. Much of that shadowy story, though, is barely known today, even among educational experts. That’s a problem, and potentially an existential threat.

When examined honestly, the history of public education—and a study of the key men who laid the foundations for the system that now exists—reveals a long-term plan by Utopians to totally re-shape humanity and civilization along collectivist lines. This agenda has been remarkably successful thus far, as the polling data show.

Everybody involved in education knows about John Dewey and Horace Mann, of course. These two socialist luminaries are almost universally credited with having created the modern public education system in the United States. Their backgrounds and views will be addressed in upcoming articles in this series on education.

But the true story of government schools has its origins long before Mann became the first education commissioner of Massachusetts, with his radical plan to have the government take over education, using the Prussian model.

New Harmony

Much of the earlier history of public schools—before Mann picked up the baton—remains not just obscure, but practically unknown. Were it not for the meticulous research of the late Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld, a passionate educator who devoted six decades of his life to studying education and the science of reading, it might still be awaiting discovery in dusty old libraries and university archives in the United States and Europe.

The real story of government education can be traced to a long-forgotten communist commune in Indiana called “New Harmony,” and its eccentric founder. Established in the 1820s by Robert Owen, a Welsh Utopian who rejected Christianity and private property, the idea behind the settlement was to show the world that collectivism was actually superior to individualism.

Like the communist experiments of the 20th century—Cuba, Zimbabwe, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and so on—New Harmony was a disaster, albeit not as bloody as the socialist experiments of later years. Within two years of its establishment, though, everybody knew New Harmony was a total failure.

The utter implosion of this experiment in collectivism, which preceded Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto” by some two decades, is the reason those early advocates of collectivism made the adoption of mandatory government schools for all children their top priority. The thinking was that the commune failed not because of anything wrong with communism or collectivism, but because the people living there had not been properly socialized and “educated” to be collectivists from childhood.

Just like Marx and Engels would claim decades later, the Owenites believed that what was needed were government schools that would take over child rearing from the earliest possible ages. And so that became their sole focus.

Character Education

Among other ideas, Owen rejected the prevailing Calvinist views of America in that era. These held that man is innately depraved and that his heart is desperately wicked. Owen believed the reason men were evil, selfish, individualistic, and violent was the result of their upbringing, not their nature. He believed human nature was essentially good, and that a collectivist education would help create what would later come to be known as the “New Soviet man.”

Even before he set up New Harmony, Owen had well-developed ideas on the sort of education that would be needed to build his imagined Utopia. He published some of his views on this subject in 1813 in a collection dubbed “A New View of Society or Essays on the Formation of the Human Character.”

“It follows that every state, to be well governed, ought to direct its chief attention to the formation of character, and that the best-governed state will be that which shall possess the best national system of education,” Owen declared.

“Under the guidance of minds competent to its direction, a national system of training and education may be formed, to become the most safe, easy, effectual, and economical instrument of government that can be devised. And it may be made to possess a power equal to the accomplishment of the most grand and beneficial purposes.”

Years later, Owen explained in his own autobiography that his essays on education had been given to the king of Prussia by the Prussian ambassador. According to Owen’s account, the Prussian ruler had “so much approved” of these ideas that he ordered his own government to create a national education system based upon them. And thus, the Prussian system of education—schooling of the state, by the state, and for the state—was officially born.

This Owen-inspired totalitarian model of schooling, which segregated children by age and coerced parents to surrender their children to the state for “education,” would eventually become the model for Massachusetts—and then the nation as a whole. And the history would gradually be forgotten as the rotten fruit of this system began to undermine traditional American values and ideas.

Secret Society

Long before the horrific communist slaughters and genocides of the 20th century, Owen and his ideas found enthusiastic supporters among certain segments of the American elite. One of Owen’s early disciples was Orestes Brownson, a prominent New England writer and editor who became totally dedicated to the cause.

Unlike Owen, who went to his grave passionately believing that simply getting control of the children through government schools would produce Utopia, Brownson eventually rejected collectivism, converted to Catholicism, and blew the whistle on the schemes of his former associates.

“The great object was to get rid of Christianity,” Brownson explained in “An Oration on Liberal Studies” after seeing the light. “The plan was not to make open attacks on religion although we might belabor the clergy and bring them into contempt where we could; but to establish a system of state, we said, national schools, from which all religion was to be excluded, in which nothing was to be taught but such knowledge as is verifiable by the senses and to which all parents were to be compelled by law to send their children.”

Today, that is the norm. But back in the early- to mid-1800s, it would have been inconceivable to average people.

The first element of the plan, Brownson revealed, was to establish a system of government-controlled schools. “For this purpose, a secret society was formed,” Brownson continued, saying the plan was to model it on the Carbonari in Europe.

“The members of this secret society were to avail themselves of all the means in their power, each in his own locality, to form public opinion in favor of education by the state at the public expense, and to get such men elected to the legislatures as would be likely to favor our purposes.”

While Brownson didn’t know how far the secret society’s tentacles extended, he did know that a “considerable portion of the State of New York was organized.” He knew that, he said, because “I was myself one of the agents for organizing it.”

By the very nature of “secret” societies, much of the history of this network remains concealed. But it is obvious that they found great success in advancing government schools. In less than a century, government education proliferated all across the United States.

Stay tuned to this space for more of that incredible history in the weeks and months to come.

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This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

An article written by freelance writer Erin O’Donnell and published in Harvard Magazine has justifiably gone viral among the diverse homeschooling communities operating in the United States—for the moment the freest nation in the world. The article, titled “The Risks of Homeschooling,” is accompanied by a cartoon illustration of half a dozen children romping joyfully outside while one child locked behind the prison bars of her own home looks forlornly and longingly out at them. One of the exterior walls of her home depicts books with the words “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Bible” to ensure readers know that the prison guards are Christians.

O’Donnell’s article is far less important than the work of the woman about whom O’Donnell is writing: Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, a long-time opponent of home-schooling and proponent of feminism, abortion, and the near-absolute autonomy of children. Too few people, it seems, are reading Bartholet’s deeply troubling Arizona Law Review article “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection” on which O’Donnell’s article is based and in which Bartholet lays bare her subversive plan to radically refashion American society according to the philosophical, political, and moral fever dreams of leftists everywhere. Bartholet issues an explicit call for a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling. While Bartholet claims to be concerned about homeschooling in general, it’s clear from her article that she has a particular antipathy for Christian homeschoolers.

While Bartholet belches out some gaseous but tactically useful words of concern about potential abuse of children by fringy parents and cites some fringy anecdotes to becloud the issue, her real goal is not to end physical abuse but, rather, to undermine parental authority, increase the power of the state, and remake the Constitution into a living, breathing leftist phantasm.

Bartholet argues that “Appropriate education. … makes children aware of important cultural values. …  [H]omeschooling parents … are not likely to be capable of satisfying the democratic function.”

Homeschooling parents will likely be not only taken aback by that claim but also confused by it. What, they may wonder, are those “important cultural values” and what renders homeschooling parents incapable of satisfying the democratic function. While Bartholet doesn’t specifically identify the “important cultural values” on which the democratic function relies, it’s not difficult to infer what they are from oblique statements like this:

[T]he current homeschooling regime is based on a dangerous idea about parent rights. … [t]hat parents who are committed to beliefs and values counter to those of the larger society are entitled to bring their children up in isolation. … This legal claim is inconsistent with the child’s right to what has been called an “open future”—the right to exposure to alternative views and experiences essential for children to grow up to exercise meaningful choices about their own future views, religions, lifestyles, and work. … [E]xposure to the values of tolerance … has been seen as a primary goal of public education from its origins.

Since tolerance has been redefined by leftists to mean “affirming leftist sexuality dogma,” has “tolerance” really been the primary goal of public education from its origins?

To be clear that she wants the nation’s children to be indoctrinated with leftist sexuality dogma, Bartholet also criticizes families who want to teach their children “that people with nontraditional sexual orientations or gender identities should be ‘cured’ or condemned.”

Interestingly, here is what one of the studies Bartholet cites—the Cardus Education Survey—says about religious homeschoolers and the value of tolerance in the “democratic function”:

We might expect that the private and familial approach of education would fail to prepare students for effective participation in a democracy. But we don’t find any evidence for this. … [H]omeschoolers are more willing than public schoolers to extend freedom of speech to those who want to speak out against religion. And we don’t find any difference in the extent that homeschoolers favor greater tolerance for non-Christian religions in American society. Relatedly, some might expect that religious homeschoolers would socialize students into more authoritarian orientations to public life. However, on one of the measures often used to capture authoritarian orientations, respect for authority, we don’t find that homeschoolers are any more supportive than public schoolers are of the notion that one of the main problems in the US today is the lack of respect for authority. It seems that one of the strengths of homeschooling, which may be related to the counter-cultural minority status of homeschooling, is robust support for democratic principles of individual freedom and freedom of expression.

When she likes Cardus findings, Bartholet calls them “good social science.” When she dislikes them, Bartholet dismisses them as “advocacy.”

Repeatedly and ironically, Bartholet frets that,

homeschooled children miss out on exposure to others with different experiences and values. … A very large proportion of homeschooling parents are ideologically committed to isolating their children from the majority culture and indoctrinating them in views and values that are in serious conflict with that culture.

Never once does she mention the ideological monopoly on sexuality that perverts public education and results in pervasive censorship of resources that express dissenting views. Nor does she critically examine her assumption that the role of education is to affirm the views and values of “majority culture.” Did she hold that position in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s?

In her section on the “Child Maltreatment Piece of the Homeschooling Picture,” Bartholet writes that the “very isolation of so many homeschooling families puts children at risk. Child maltreatment takes place disproportionately in families cut off from the larger community.” First, Bartholet provides no evidence of the percentage of all homeschooling families or of religious homeschooling families that are “cut off from the larger community.” And then, as evidence for her implicit claim that homeschooling poses a danger to children, she cites in a footnote her own book written over two decades ago on systemic problems with the child welfare system.

While discussing her alleged fears regarding socialization, Bartholet says nothing about the serious socialization problems in public schools that range from drug and alcohol use; sexting; and social contagions related to eating disorders, suicide, cutting, and gender dysphoria.

Bartholet cites a study by the pro-regulation organization Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, which is an affiliate of pro-regulation organization Coalition for Responsible Home Education, as evidence that homeschooled children are at greater risk of death, but the study itself concludes that “This finding does not yet reach the threshold for statistical significance, so at this point we cannot say conclusively that homeschooled students die from child abuse and neglect at a higher rate as other students.”

Would increased regulation increase safety for children? Does regulation and oversight by Big Brother guarantee child safety? How does Bartholet account for the abuse of children in highly regulated government schools by school staff? As a result of that abuse, is she calling for a presumptive ban on public schools?

Bartholet has a game plan that she defends in part by employing the bandwagon fallacy, arguing that “Many countries ban homeschooling altogether, others fail to legally recognize it, and many impose significant requirements, often including required home visits and annual testing.”

Get with the European program, you philistines!

Bartholet believes that,

The homeschooling movement’s claim that the current regime is justified by absolute parent rights is morally wrong and inconsistent with growing recognition worldwide that child human rights have equal status with adult human rights. … The movement relies on adult freedom of religion rights to oppose regulation affecting religious homeschoolers. But such rights should not trump child rights to exposure to alternative views, enabling them to exercise meaningful future choice about their religion.

So, while Bartholet wants to prevent Christian parents from inculcating their own children with their religious worldview, she wants to ensure that government schools are allowed to inculcate other people’s children with only leftist sexual views and, in so doing, prevent those children from being able “to exercise meaningful future choice” about sexual matters.

Bartholet’s proposes a “new regime” for homeschooling that would require permission to homeschool, which would be granted under only very narrow circumstances, and would require that homeschooled students still attend government schools part-time:

The new regime should deny the right to homeschool, subject to carefully delineated exceptions for situations in which homeschooling is needed and appropriate. Parents should have a significant burden of justification for a requested exception. There is no other way to ensure that children receive an education or protection against maltreatment at all comparable to that provided to public school children. … When exceptions are granted, children should still be required to attend some courses and other programs at school.

Bartholet’s fervor for mandating that Christians teach leftist views to their own children extends to Christian private schools as well:

Some private schools pose problems of the same nature as homeschooling. Religious and other groups with views and values far outside the mainstream operate private schools with very little regulation ensuring that children receive … exposure to alternative perspectives.

Bartholet points to three obstacles to her plan to achieve absolute autonomy for children and destroy the family: The Homeschool Legal Defense Association, organized parents, and the U.S. Constitution. She attacks all three and offers a plan for circumventing the U.S. Constitution until such time as it can be changed.

She argues that “state constitutional provisions on education provide a strong basis for challenges to the homeschooling regime,” and that “State court decisions based on state constitutions can eventually provide evidence of the kind of national consensus that often helps the Supreme Court find new meaning in the Federal Constitution.”

In an email to this writer, constitutional attorney Joseph A. Morris, who served as assistant attorney general of the United States under President Ronald Reagan, writes that Bartholet’s screed is “one of [the left’s] most important and most powerful attacks, against the family. … Bartholet’s article is a call to arms to the left to attack parental authority by means of a frontal attack on home-schooling.”

Mr. Morris offered too the larger context from which Bartholet’s “call to arms” emerges and summarizes her dangerous strategic plan:

Since the time Marx published The Communist Manifesto, the left has understood that to prevail against the civilization of the West—made strong by the organic relationships we generally describe under the rubrics of faith and family—it must seize control of the minds of children at the earliest possible time. Parental control of schooling, either by supervising how others educate their children or by doing it themselves, is a major obstacle to this prime tyrannical goal.

Bartholet marshals every argument, including (1) the asserted inferiority of home-schooling against the governmental product; (2)  the asserted roots of the modern home-schooling movement in racism and religious benightedness; (3)  home-schooling as a mask for child abuse, including child sexual abuse; and similar horribles.

She seeks to awaken and mobilize every constituency that would join the battle against parental authority and home-schooling, including public sector (teachers’) unions, which have direct financial stakes in forcing children into government schools; child-protection advocates; opponents of racism, religion, particularity of every stripe, and binary sexual worldviews; and progressives in every category.

She is not content to argue that, in protecting parental authority and the rights of home-schoolers, American courts have lately misinterpreted and misapplied the provisions of the United States Constitution. Her enterprise is far more ambitious than that. She proposes to take on the evil United States Constitution itself, and to use home-schooling as a good battleground on which to launch that war.

The heart of her legal argument will be found on page 59:  “The U.S. Constitution with its negative rights structure is an anomaly, outdated and inadequate by the standards of the rest of the world.” In two or three rather clear paragraphs on that page she makes her case against the American constitutional tradition and sets her gunsights squarely on the Constitution itself, hoping to overturn it by using the case for “affirmative rights” of children to education free of parental domination (and thus, of course, open to domination by someone else!). To this end, then, she marches off to praise foreign constitutional traditions, even of other democracies, that Americans have rejected since founding modern constitutionalism in the 18th century.

This article was meant to be a clarion call to arms, seeking to mobilize her radical confreres in all Marxist domains and the progressive left in general. The article is being widely touted throughout the legal and academic communities.  It is already on the nightstands of teachers’ union presidents, leftist community organizers, mainstream media editorial writers, and crafty plaintiffs’ lawyers from coast to coast. Once the pandemic ends, the 2020 elections are held, and State legislatures convene for their 2021 sessions, leftist think tanks will spoon-feed cookie-cutter legislation to “progressive” State senators and representatives to begin the long project of abolishing home schooling, by overburdening it with regulation to the point that parents collapse of exhaustion, or by outright prohibition, if necessary.

The publication of Bartholet’s article in a law journal, even an obscure one, gives it a veneer of “mainstream” legal scholarship. I have no doubt that she will soon have a publisher for a full-length, less technical version of the article as a book meant for a wide general readership.

The drumbeat of anti-home-schooling editorials will begin in the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post within months, and certainly in time to attempt to set agendas across the land in the 2021 State legislative season.  

We should thank Erin O’Donnell for bringing to wider attention the insidious efforts of Ivory Tower leftist Bartholet to exploit the U.S. Constitution and state constitutions to ban homeschooling or regulate it into submission to leftist assumptions.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Harvard-Law-Professor-Wants-to-Ban-Homeschooling.mp3

Read more:

Public Schools Failing Illinois Children Academically

American Students Are Failing: You Can Thank Public Schools

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Written by Paul Kengor

Last week I looked at the history of the original socialists and at what Pope Francis aptly termed their “ideological colonization” of the family and marriage, work that started in the 19th century with the likes of Robert Owen, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Whether they know it or not, today’s nature-redefiners — who target the family or marriage or sexuality or gender — are standing on the shoulders of those 19th century ideologues, utopians who sought to replace the natural-traditional-Biblical family with their own conceptions. Socialism’s new strategies are certainly different from the old, but the rebellion against God and His absolutes remains the same.

In recent decades, eager socialists in the West have been ripping down the traditional family from Scandinavia to Ireland. The spectacle in Ireland was especially disturbing. It was one of the few places where marriage was redefined not by unhinged judges or a left-wing Parliament but by national referendum in a one-time Catholic country where the majority no longer cares about the 2,000-year Christian teaching on the sanctity of marriage. Ireland’s citizenry once led the way in sending priests and nuns to the English-speaking world. Today the Irish take the lead as angry scoffers at their ancestors’ faith.

Socialism’s Bait and Switch

The contemporary left’s effort to fundamentally transform the family has been relentless, opportunistic and multi-faceted. Even in countries like Italy and France, where the populace was not demanding same-sex marriage, socialist politicians are hell-bent on giving it to them anyway.

Under the leadership of socialist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Italy just approved same-sex civil unions, which everyone in the country understands as the Italian left’s mere first step to securing same-sex marriage and adoption of children as well. Still, even there we can mainly blame the electorate. Italian citizens, after all, voted for the socialists. They did so not because they wanted the left’s wider cultural-social agenda. They voted for cradle-to-grave freebies and never-ending pensions from the nanny state, not for the redefinition of family and marriage.

But sadly, what they do not realize (or tolerate as a trade-off for socialism’s wondrous freebies) is that when you vote for the left for economic reasons you inevitably also get its cultural-social agenda — which undermines the natural-traditional-biblical family. If you are addicted to the welfare the socialist doctor provides, then you also accept his cultural brew. Such is the plight of the welfare junkie addicted to the state’s largesse.

Thus, Italians en masse remain sympathetic to Pope Francis and his appeals against same-sex marriage and the “demon” of gender ideology. Nonetheless, when you hold out your hands for “free” government goodies, among the candy in the socialist bag is family redefinition. You want the fat pension? Okay, fine, but you also must give a thumbs-up to gay unions.

Time to pay the socialist piper, kiddies.

Obama and the Democratic Socialists of America

As for America, our situation is not wildly different. We are getting an aggressive “LGBTQ” political-cultural agenda under Barack Obama’s expansive left-wing umbrella of “fundamental transformation.” That was not what the rank-and-file Obama voter was expecting in November 2008. Certainly, the record number of millions of African-Americans (historically the most religious voting demographic in the country) who enthusiastically voted for Obama did so for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with transgender bathroom edicts. But alas, the fundamental transformation they are getting is a White House literally illuminated in the rainbow colors of the gay-rights movement.

We should not delude ourselves that Barack Obama, the most far-left president we have ever had, is not a socialist of some sort. As Stanley Kurtz showed several years ago, we know that Obama was actually for a time in the 1990s a member of the socialist New Party. (For extended analysis, see my book on Obama’s long-time mentor, The Communist.) If Obama remains a socialist, he remains one from a cultural perspective as much as an economic one.

But moving away from Obama, look at the platforms of the dominant socialists in America today when it comes to family-sexuality issues.

The website of the influential Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is quite open about its social goals. Its “About DSA” section lists among its three planks the broad objective of seeking to “restructure gender and cultural relationships.” The DSA has been carrying the rainbow flag for quite some time. It passed a resolution at the annual convention in November 2011:

DSA calls for the legalization of same-sex marriages in all the States and Territories of the United States of America; the enactment of anti-discrimination laws in housing, jobs, education, and health care; and the repeal of state sodomy laws and anti-lesbian and gay restrictions.

That was merely point one in a very comprehensive seven-point statement on “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Rights” that also included (among other things) “making public schools safe and bias-free for LGBTQ students, defending their free speech in school and allowing students to start gay-straight alliance clubs” and advancing “the rights of LGBTQ people to parent.” Very tellingly, point four in the DSA statement insisted: “DSA advocates for local and federal non-discrimination laws and insists that religious beliefs cannot be used to justify bias.”

For the record, the objectives of the DSA statement are almost identical to those of Socialist Party USA, whose official platform includes a statement pledging, “We are committed to confronting the heterosexism that provides the fertile ground for homophobic violence, and support all efforts toward fostering understanding and cooperation among persons and groups of differing sexual orientations.”

And if you want to go further left still, John Bachtell, Communist Party USA chair, recently writing in People’s World (successor to the Daily Worker), called for a socialist-communist-progressive-liberal-Democrat coalition, coalescing around Bernie Sanders, to “fight uncompromisingly against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia.”

Marx and Engels: Proud Papas

What would Marx and Engels have thought about their name and ideology being invoked in the modern left’s crusade against “transphobia?” Well, they would have been shocked speechless. But they surely would have appreciated how their left-wing descendants found such handy tools to undermine the traditional family. Today’s leftists may not succeed in a total “abolition of the family” (to borrow from the phrase in The Communist Manifesto), but they are certainly succeeding in fundamentally transforming the institution.

Once upon a time, when we worried about socialists undermining the family, our concern was the economic destitution wrought by the ideology and its counterfactual theories about property and wealth confiscation and redistribution. In the old days, socialists harmed the family by leaving a dad jobless or the household scratching for income in a decimated economy. Today, we need to widen our horizon of socialism’s destructive possibilities. Modern socialists are not thinking merely about managing the state’s economic means of production; they are seeking to completely manage and revamp society’s very understanding of the human family itself.

They are, in short, fundamental transformers not just economically but culturally. And they operate a giant wrecking ball that is wreaking havoc in millions of lives.

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This article was originally posted at the Stream.org